During the past several years, environmental pollution concerns have led those active in the coatings, castings and moldings arts to develop various curable compositions in which organic solvents derived from petroleum have been eliminated or at least substantially minimized. Thus, compositions such as water-based compositions and high solids compositions have been extensively investigated. Even more recently the petroleum embargo and the resultant high cost and scarcity of petroleum by-products has engendered interest in the development of curable compositions which are composed entirely of, or at least substantially of, inorganic components.
A number of water-soluble or water-dispersible silicate compounds are known in the art. Such compounds include sodium silicates, potassium silicates, lithium silicates and quaternary ammonium silicates which readily dissolve or disperse in water. When such water-soluble or -dispersible silicates are blended with insolubilizing agent (i.e. crosslinkers), quite often the resultant solution is very unstable. Thus, there have been developed latent metal ion containing insolubilizing agents so that useful one-package coating compositions could be formed.